{"id":2023,"date":"2025-05-20T12:00:29","date_gmt":"2025-05-20T18:00:29","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/embeddedor.com\/blog\/?p=2023"},"modified":"2025-05-20T18:14:10","modified_gmt":"2025-05-21T00:14:10","slug":"speaking-at-the-university-of-adelaide","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/embeddedor.com\/blog\/2025\/05\/20\/speaking-at-the-university-of-adelaide\/","title":{"rendered":"Speaking at The University of Adelaide"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

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While in Australia 🇦🇺, I had the honor of being invited to give a guest talk to graduate and master’s students at The University of Adelaide<\/a>. It was a truly special experience because it was my first time presenting at a university, and one I deeply value as a meaningful milestone in my career. 🙂🙏🏼<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Enhancing spatial safety: Better array-bounds checking in C (and Linux) (University of Adelaide \u2013Guest talk)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The C language has historically suffered from a lack of proper bounds-checking on all kinds of arrays. The Kernel Self-Protection Project has been addressing this issue for several years. In this presentation, we will learn about the most recent hardening efforts to resolve the problem of bounds-checking, particularly for fixed-size and flexible arrays.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

We will explore the different mechanisms being used to harden key APIs like memcpy()<\/code> against buffer overflows, which includes the use of some interesting built-in compiler functions. We will also talk about a couple of recent compiler options like -fstrict-flex-arrays<\/code> and -Wflex-array-member-not-at-end<\/code>, as well as the new counted_by<\/code> attribute released in Clang-18 a year ago, which helps us gain run-time bounds-checking coverage on flexible arrays.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Overall, we will discuss how various challenges have been overcome, and highlight the innovations developed to solve the problem of array bounds-checking in both C and the Linux kernel once and for all.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

See the slides below.<\/p>\n\n\nuniadl2025<\/a>\n\n\n

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See the video of the presentation below.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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